A review on populist policies in Turkey

One of the biggest problems faced by Social Sciences all over the world is the common definitions of concepts. Although the concept of populism has been frequently used in the political science literature since the 19th century, it is seen that a common definition has not yet been made on the concept. In this study, the definitions in the literature on populism have been analyzed and it has been observed that populism is not considered as a concept on its own, but rather it is tried to be defined in the context of ideology, discourse and strategy discussions. In contrast to trying to define populism in the context of ideology, strategy or discourse approaches, this study argues that populism is a flexible concept that has definable characteristics and cannot be monopolized by right or left ideologies. In this context, the study first analyzes the antecedent components of populism and discusses the approaches. The second section examines the emergence of populism in the world. In support of the fact that the concept of populism is a concept that cannot belong only to right or left politics, two different examples of right and left populist parties in Greece are analyzed. At the beginning of the last chapter, the emergence of populism in Turkey, which situations are considered as populism, populist politics and how populist discourses are formed are emphasized. In the following chapters of the last section, the discourses of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's mass opening ceremony and Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu's "Adalet Yürüyüşü" the representatives of two different ideologies in Turkey, were analyzed in the context of populism and populist discourse. As a result of the analysis, the argument that populism is far from being an ideology, but a discourse production tool or a concept that can be handled as a strategy is supported by the fact that it can be used in both right and left ideologies.